Calendar

In the News (from Spiegel International): ““The list of accomplishments this latest European Union summit was supposed to deliver was long: The euro zone was to receive a substantial push forward with a decisive redesign of the currency union’s architecture. There was even to be a new convention to rapidly adjust EU treaties to the realities of the changes occurring in the euro zone. …

“Yet by the time the 27 heads of state and government arrived in Brussels on Thursday evening, such ambition had been forgotten. It could be pre-Christmas exhaustion that got the better of the EU leaders, but enthusiasm for reform was nowhere to be found. One after another, they insisted that they would merely hold nonbinding talks about the deepening of the currency union. After nine hours of talks, the summit agreed on a five-page paper that, while called a ‘roadmap,’ is little more than a vague outline for the next six months. Indeed, the most concrete date mentioned is June 2013 – by then, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy is to have worked out a solid timeline for the establishment of closer fiscal policy coordination among eurozone member states. He is also to examine how bilateral reform treaties between the European Commission and individual common currency members could look in order to make reforms recommended by Brussels more binding. The creation of a fund – referred to vaguely as ‘solidarity mechanisms’ at the insistence of Germany – that could be used to reward those countries serious about reform is also to be examined.”

My Comment: European leaders are lost in the new world; they do not understand what is happening, and in this state, the best decision is to decide nothing. They act reasonably and sensibly, looking at what is happening. However, the development in the direction of integration continues, and the social systems that were created in the past become less and less suitable for working with them; that is, they increase the crisis, but that the answer is not in changing the world, but in changing man; this still needs to be understood and then only to agree with the need for integral education.[95784]